Abstract
The relevance of a biographical approach to studies about the future is the topic of this chapter. In a discussion that takes its point of departure in theories of time and temporality, the significance of particular aspects of historical periods for what topics about the future are deemed research-worthy is addressed. The chapter addresses how ideas about Progress impacted on notions of time and temporality during earlier historical periods. Empirical studies discussed in this chapter demonstrate their embeddedness in specific circumstances and particular historical periods. These research topics thus provide insights into how changes at the structural level, be they environmental problems such as climate change, pandemics, or credit crises, in any present are woven into and become topics in individual biographical accounts. The early studies of women and time and gendered thoughts about the future, for instance, originated in a period when changes in gender relations in all areas of social life happened at a rapid pace in the Scandinavian countries in particular. The chapter shows that whilst gender, age and social class are essential analytical elements of sociological analysis that transcend historical periods, the contexts of their impact are diverse and varied.
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The continuance or disappearance of that which arises is the present passing into the future. (Mead 1932/2002, p. 53)
Introduction
In Chap. 4 time different levels of temporality related to biographical life course research were in focus. In spite of some overlap with the former chapter the focus here is on the importance of a biographical approach to studies about the future. This approach is particularly relevant for capturing the connection between temporal levels as it provides insights into how changes at the structural level, be they environmental problems such as climate change or credit crises in the present, are woven into and become topics in individual biographical accounts. The chapter provides examples from a variety of contexts and approaches.
From an historical point of view the idea that the future could be foretold and anticipated, is novel. The idea that humans, not deities, were in command of their own fate was important for how the future was imagined; not as something that was ordained by religion, but by directions of development decided by and acted upon by human agency. Thus originated the idea of Progress—that societies evolve towards an ever more developed state,Footnote 1 and that history is a tale of a linear temporal development of the social world (Kumar 1995).
In empirical research the future as a topic has been on and off the agenda over the years. Following Mead’s thoughts on time, the present is the location of events that decide what aspects of it are brought into a focus on thoughts about the future. Confining the discussion to biographical life course research the topics that are found of interest to relate to in how the future is envisaged, are always grounded in a present situation in any given society.
Barbara Adam (1990) observed that studies about the future were often related to social planning and clock time was the main temporal aspect drawn into discussions. The studies she referred to were done in the period from the 1970s until the mid-1980s (Adam 1990, pp. 96–97) and although not stated directly it is clear that issues relating to specific periods and places impact on what aspects of the future are brought into research questions. It is therefore of interest to tie the studies discussed in this chapter to the historical periods they originated in. The chapter thus starts with a wide sweeping overview of some important trends over historical periods, including ideas that have been prominent in sociological research. In studies involving thoughts about the future at a societal level environmental concerns have been of importance. A section of this chapter therefore discusses such themes. Young people’s thoughts about their future life is a topic that has been covered in many studies. In addition to a general discussion about this issue, the chapter introduces social class as a specific theme in addition to presenting a gender sensitive approach throughout.
The Future Across Historical Time
In the 1990s discussions about time and temporalities implied that there was a fundamental shift in time perceptions happening during the period leading up to the new millennium. Many studies were theoretical and contrasted the future with the historical development of the twentieth century, a period historian Eric Hobsbawm (1994) named The Age of Extremes. The social and economic changes during an age of stability and economic growth in the Western world between 1945 and the mid-1970s, saw the establishing of welfare states and increased social mobility as systems of education were expanded and higher education became accessible to more students from non-academic backgrounds. The large baby boomer cohorts born in the immediate aftermath of the second world war became the first to experience a ‘democratisation of youth’—more young people stayed in education for longer, access to contraceptives became important for women to take control of their own reproduction. The women’s movement became a force for change, especially in the North-Western part of EuropeFootnote 2 and North America. After the mid-70 s Keynesian economics gradually lost ground to a deregulation of the economy in most countries. This marked the end of what Hobsbawm called the Golden Age and affected the welfare states, the financial, and housing markets and contributed to increased social and economic inequality within and between the world’s nation states (Stiglitz 2012). The Wall fell and an intended globalised division of labour moved manufacturing jobs from the industrialised West to Eastern European and Asian countries in order to cut costs that included both worker’s wages and costs for covering demands put on production units by national worker protection legislations.Footnote 3 Many industrial communities in the Western countries were left behind as workplaces were taken away, for instance in the UK (MacDonald and Shildrick 2018).
In the decade leading up to the turn of the millennium there was much focus on the individual in social research and less so on the structural side of matters. Such perspectives could be thought to be associated with an increase in focussing on the uncertainty of the future. Lack of attention to the structural level could exacerbate uncertainties in people’s lives as the biography-history dynamic was no longer part of debates. If people are led to believe that life is an individual endeavour where structural factors have no relevance, the future will be regarded by the same standards (Brannen and Nilsen 2005).
German life course researcher Karl-Ulrich Mayer (2004) commented on the situation where external structural forces were seemingly deemed obsolete in discussions about life course and biography,
Sociologists have newly celebrated the significance of human agency (…) and the individualisation of life decisions and life styles in patchwork biographies (…). Fewer daily working hours, coupled with considerable disposable income, open up a variety of self-chosen milieus and habitus. [Comparisons to pre-World War II] seem to echo pictures of an old past. If at all, it appears as if it is the lack of limits of options, the unlimited flexibilization and pluralisation that pose the post-modern condition. Under such premises it seems almost odd to raise the question of how life courses are shaped by forces external to the individual person, how historical conditions, the good or bad fortunes of national citizenship or institutional arrangements built the tracks that individual trajectories are bound to follow’. (pp. 161–162)
The focus on the individual during this period at the end of the Cold War coincided with a time when major Western powers, the UK and the USA in particular, had governments that strongly backed ‘individual enterprise’, deregulation of finance and so-called neo-liberal policies. Fukuyama’s well known paper ‘The End of History?’ published in 1989, the same year the Wall fell, added to the voices that together said something about the ‘zeitgeist’ and of the beliefs popular at the time.
This snapshot of conditions in the second half of the twentieth century is an important backcloth for understanding the types of perspectives and approaches on studies about the future that were carried out in biographical and other sociological fields. In much of this research time itself as well as temporal orientations were said to have changed significantly over the latter half of the century.
David Harvey (1990) contrasted contemporary society to earlier periods in history with a focus on the changes in capitalism, especially with reference to transportation and communication that had affected the spatial and temporal aspects of life. His concept the time-space compression was central in his theoretical ideas about the changed relationship between time and space that had occurred in the twentieth century. Others focussed on the changes in meaning attached to the future. Since the future was actually ‘present in the present’, the future was humanly constructed in the present (Adam 1990). Notions such as ‘the extended present’ (Nowotny 1994), where the future has ceased to exist as a temporal dimension in its own right because of an ‘overload’ of choices in the present’ that determines the future, were widely discussed (Adam 1995). The future was however also associated with ‘risks’ and ‘uncertainties’ (Bauman 1998a, b; Beck 1992; Giddens 1994).
Zygmunt Bauman (1998a) observed that not all groups of people were equally able to manage risk and to feel in control of their lives in the present, much less in the future. Access to space-time resources was shaped and differentiated by relationship to the labour market. As welfare states were cut back, access to wage work, or lack of such access, became markers of qualitatively different types of resources. Those in the ‘first world’—the world of work—live in time, albeit they feel constantly short of it. For them space is not an issue because it can be transcended as they wish, they can go anywhere they want to. Those in the ‘second world’, the world without work, are constrained by the space they inhabit and have an excess of time (Bauman 1998a, pp. 88–89). In the literature the insecurities in people’s lives during this period were thought to impact on how the future was imagined. For those with access to resources insecurity was not a main topic. For the many with little or no access to the resources needed to feel in control of their lives and of their future, uncertainty and insecurity remained a fact of life. Bauman (1998b) made a distinction between the ‘tourists’ and the ‘vagabonds’. The former could travel and change location as they liked since they were inhabitants of the ‘first world’ and in command of their resources. ‘Vagabonds’ of the ‘second world’ on the other hand, were expected to drift to places where work opportunities were available. In contrast to tourists, they were not in control of their own time or had resources to choose location according to personal preferences.
On a more general level environmental problems of the long-term future were high on the agenda at this time. Adam (1995) said of these that they had ‘the effect of widening the gaps between the time-scale of the problem, the time-span of concern and the horizon for action’ (p. 132).Footnote 4
Empirically in biographical research the future has often been the topic in studies of young people and their ideas about their future lives. In the last decade of the twentieth century such studies were particularly prevalent. There are probably many reasons for this but historical events and the general ‘zeitgeist’ of belief in the single individual and ‘it’s all up to you alone’ that added to apprehension in the face of social and economic changes and the new millennium, could be important factors to take into consideration.
Thoughts About the Future and Wider Societal Issues
Thus period specific conditions are not only of importance for types of topics focussed on in theoretical writings,Footnote 5 they also impact on how people envisage, or imagine, the future, both in relation to their own lives and that of society as whole. Concerns about the natural environment, recently with specific focus on climate change, are not new to the social sciences. In studies of time Adam (1990, 1995) has been a pioneer in theoretical ideas on the subject, ‘Environmental change is one aspect of globalisation that is difficult to ignore. It affects people’s health and enforces changes in routine daily actions’ (Adam 1995, p. 125). These concerns affect all levels of time and temporalities, thoughts about the future not least.
In the mid-1990s a small grant gave me the opportunity to interview two cohorts of men and women about their thoughts of their future lives. The overarching research questions were related to if and how environmental topics were thought about in relation to the future at an individual level. The interviews followed a biographical design and topics included all aspects of future life; education, employment and family. Thoughts about the distant future were approached in questions about how they envisaged life would be like for their children. Theoretically a grounded approach opened up an opportunity to allow concepts to emerge from the data. I found that ordinary, everyday terms such as dreams, hopes and plans were helpful for identifying temporal horizons in young people’s thoughts about future life (Nilsen 1999). Dreams were defined as thoughts about the future that belonged in a timeless and spaceless realm; ‘one day’ of the dream had similarities to fairy tales’ ‘once upon a time’. Hopes were more tangible in the sense that they were seen as belonging in the dimension of what was conceivable in that they had time and space associations. The most concrete of these terms is a plan. It has a set time horizon and a space or place association, and there is an element of control involved. In a sense a plan is a short-term projection of the present into the immediate future. ‘Where the feeling of control ends and uncertainty begins, hoping takes over for planning’ (Nilsen 1999, p. 180).
The young people’s thoughts about the environment, which in the mid-1990s included a number of issues such as hazards from new technologies, including GMO and nuclear technology, depletion of the ozone layer etc. came up in the interviews. A topic which has since come to dominate the discussion of such issues, global warming, was at that time considered only one of many future threats for humanity. In the analysis these were conceptualised following Beck’s (1992) distinction between ‘risks’ and ‘threats’ which were important notions in discussions about topics related to environmental issues at the time. RisksFootnote 6 were thought of as events where some form of predictability and insurance against bad outcomes were possible (Beck 1992).Footnote 7 Threats on the other hand referred to phenomena that were beyond the realm of prediction and occurred outside the boundaries of linear time. The non-linear quality affected the observable cause-effect relationship; the distance between cause and effect in temporal and spatial terms became too vast to grasp intuitively, in contrast to those associated with risk-like events.
Because of the blurring of the causal relationship involved threat-like events seemed difficult to relate to within a biographical temporal framework, thinking about the long-term future in connection with threatening events that in and of their nature were beyond the temporal boundaries of everyday life, was challenging for the interviewees in my study. When the distance in time and space between cause and effect became too extended, the causal relationship between them became difficult to comprehend. In the article I used the concepts of ‘pollution’ and ‘environmental threat’ as examples to illustrate this point. Pollution from car fumes is immediately observable for the senses. The relationship between cause and effect, between many cars and high degree of pollution, was easy to spot since both occurred within the same space-time scope. In the article I referred to these in Beck’s concept of ‘risk’. When effects of a cause happened long after the event that caused it, the phenomenon sorted under Beck’s concept of ‘threats’,
(…) phenomena sorting in the risk category are perceived by people as more concrete and understandable, within the limits of their biographical time horizon and location in space. The outcome of events relating to threats are more difficult to imagine, because of their being seen as too distant and abstract to comprehend. (Nilsen 1999, p. 189)
The long-term future in itself re-emerged as a topic in studies after the millennium, but this time not only in relation to environmental issues. Carmen Leccardi (2005) addressed identity aspects of temporal elements of biographical construction in a study comparing accounts of young people in the 1980s and the early 2000s. Of particular interest was the notion of temporal acceleration, that originated in Harvey’s (1990) writings, as well as notions of fragmentation, which has become prominent in studies using cultural approaches on time. In Australian youth research the future has been a prominent topic. An example was Julia Cook (2015) who did interviews with Australian young people about their thoughts about the long-term future. She found that a certain strand of pessimism for the long-term was counterbalanced by a more optimistic and hopeful attitude towards the short-term. On topics beyond the personal Cook found that positive attitudes to technological progress were seen as contributing to a sense of hope for the future of humanity.
A vast number of studies have been done about thoughts about the future in relation to environmental issues. However, the few referred here are a small selection of those with a biographical research design.
Young People’s Thoughts About Personal Futures
The biography-history dynamic, so essential for a contextualist life course approach, is highlighted in cross-national studies. When people’s lives in one country is compared to similar groups of people in a different national context, that which is taken for granted in life becomes visible. In the late 1990 I joined a group of European colleagues in a study of young people’s thoughts about future work and family (Brannen et al. 2002).Footnote 8 In an article based on Norwegian and UK data from the project, Julia Brannen and I published an article about young people’s thoughts about the future (Brannen and Nilsen 2002). Our analysis presented three main models for young people’s thoughts. These were all associated with differences related to gender and social class. Our typologies were in contrast to theoretical ideas at the time that maintained that as the life course had become de-standardised, social class and gender were more or less obsolete in social analysis as ‘the choice biography’ had taken over for the ‘standard biography’ (Beck 1992; Beck-Gernsheim 1996; Giddens 1991).
The data from the project included both focus groups and individual interviews. In the article we analysed focus groups with men and women separately, born in the early to mid-1970s. We identified three types of approach to the future among the interviewees, depending on their education and the prospect this gave for their future employment. Those in vocational training were a couple of years younger than the university students and were very much involved with their present lives and did not think much about the future at all, hence they were characterised as what we called a model of living in the present. University students reflected more on job prospects in the future. The young women were also worried about having to defer childbirth until they had permanent employment. We called this type the adaptability and a contingency mentality model. The last group we analysed were young working class Norwegian men, and young British men of Asian origin. The latter were first generation academics in their families and although they were only 18–19 years of age they were very aware of responsibilities to their families and the expectations to succeed. The model of predictability and long term security identified this group and the Norwegian young shipyard workers who were around the same age.
By taking a contextualist life course approach to our analysis we demonstrated that the way young people thought about the future was very much associated with social class as well as gender. The de-standardisation of the life course, in the sense that life course phases had become obsolete, was not evident in our analysis.Footnote 9 The way the young thought about the future was, in keeping with Mead’s theoretical framework, from the viewpoint of their present situation as young people embedded in social contexts of their various societies. They were on course to a future that was to a great extent affected by the opportunity structures their various gender and class specific contexts had to offer.
This article was cited and to a certain extent misquoted in another article in Sociology, (Anderson et al. 2005). These authors wrote an article based on surveys with young people aged 20–29 about their plans for the future, They used the term ‘planning’ for all types of thoughts about the future they had identified in their material. Their data suggested that young people felt in control of their lives and exercised forethought ‘over quite long periods of time with respect to many aspects of their futures’ (p. 139, cited in Brannen and Nilsen 2007, p. 153). Their data consisted of households, some single, others living in couples. Based on their material which was very different from ours, and used in a completely different design from our biographical approach, they criticised us for claiming that young people did not plan ahead. Our response to this tried to clarify a number of misrepresentations these authors had made of our text (Brannen and Nilsen 2007). I include this debate here because of its topic, but also because it has some bearing on the discussions of methodological questions relating to the biographical life course approach. It illustrated the many difficulties in taking results from a biographical design and criticise these based on findings from research based on a survey strategy. When surveys are used as empirical evidence, the topics that could be captured in a processual way are divided up into discrete units where the processual qualities of conceptualisations are challenged. This was one of our main points in the discussion with Anderson et al. (2005). Our studies (their critique included my 1999 article as it was cited in Brannen and Nilsen 2002) were based on qualitative, biographical interviews and we concluded our discussion with these authors with a reference to the Meadean time perspectives that takes the present as a point of departure,
(…) it is important in studies focusing upon orientations to the past or the future to consider how the present context of people’s lives shapes how people think about the past and the future. (Brannen and Nilsen 2007, p. 158)
The meetings between research from two different designs can sometimes easily lead to misunderstandings, as in the instance cited above. More often than not however, survey researchers do not engage with results based on qualitative strategies. From such a viewpoint Anderson et al.’s taking our analysis into consideration in their discussions may be optimistically interpreted as a step in the right direction toward building bridges across methodological divides in sociology, if not methodologically then at least by referring to studies done from completely different approaches.
The research discussed in this section are examples from a period around the turn of the millennium when issues of the future were high on the agenda in a number of studies (e.g., Thomson et al. 2002; Thomson and Holland 2002).Footnote 10 The debate engendered by Brannen and Nilsen (2002) also indicated that the study of young people’s thoughts about future life during this particular period was deemed important by researchers from different approaches and empirical designs. It also opened up for demonstrating the strength of a biographical life course approach to issues where time and temporal dimensions were main concerns.
Class Specific Futures: Social Mobility
What types of questions about future life particular studies focus on are often reflections of attitudes that are common place and accepted in the society in which they originate. Topics that involved time and temporality in the 1950s were frequently related to social mobility. The movements between class position are temporal processes. In the early days such studies often focussed on ways of increasing the opportunities of families, that is men,Footnote 11 from ‘lower’ classes to become upward socially mobile.
What was, and still is, named ‘mobility channels’ were mainly the system of higher education. Thus much research focussed on questions about why there was such a slow increase in sons from of working class families who entered higher education in order to gain employment in middle class occupations, and thus improve their future prospects. During this period research questions included individual motivational factors more than structural ones.Footnote 12 In the 1950s, as today, the quantitative survey approach was dominant in studies of social class and social mobility. It was a period of conservative views and attitudes in Western sociology, and research questions that in our contemporary society would be deemed on the dubious side, especially those related to sex,Footnote 13 class or race, were common. In the individualistic approaches to social mobility—the issue that incorporated orientation to the future at the time—studies focussed particularly on what became known as DGP, ‘Deferred Gratification Pattern’ (Schneider and LysgaardFootnote 14 1953). This pattern was identified as:
(…) characteristic of the so-called “middle-class,” members of which tend to delay achievement of economic independence through a relatively elaborate process of education, tend to defer sexual gratification through intercourse, show a relatively marked tendency to save money (…) The deferred gratification pattern appears to be closely associated with “impulse renunciation”. (Scneider and Lysgaard 1953, p. 142)
The pattern was thus related to temporality and to how different social classes approached the future, in the long term and the short term. The ‘lower classes’ were deemed to focus on the immediate present and not able or willing to defer any gratification that could be gained in the here and now, or in the short-term future. Such findings were again connected to patterns of social mobility, or lack of such, as in Schneider and Lysgaard’s study. Psychological research about social class and time orientation concluded that the focus on the immediate present and instant gratification was related to personality development that could potentially lead to deviant character traits (Leshan 1952). The prejudices associated with these studies were obvious. As Schneider and Lysgaard (1953) observed, such findings were sometimes taken to indicate that ‘(…) lower class persons may conceivably have a certain contentment that keeps them attached to an existing social order even when, from the point of view of other classes, they “live like animals”’Footnote 15 (p. 148).
In contemporary sociology social class and social mobility are mostly approached from a structural perspective rather than an individualistic one, and the focus currently dominating is that of social inequality.Footnote 16
Social Inequality in Research About the Future
Period specific events such as the 2008 financial crisis added weight to a wider sense of uncertainty in societies as the crisis ‘came out of the blue’ and was predicted by no one in the mainstream,Footnote 17 economists or politicians. Social inequality has never left the sociological field as a topic of research. However, after the 2008 crisis it was pushed up on the agenda of research interest. Thomas Piketty’s (2014) economic-historical study of the unequal distribution of capital in society had a strong impact on the interest in social and economic inequality as a research topic.Footnote 18 As an increasing percentage of societies’ wealth is in the hands of fewer and fewer families, inheritance—the intergenerational transmission of wealth—contributes to upholding and enhancing patterns of social and economic inequality. Intergenerational transmissions as a topic are therefore a ‘social issue’ as much as a matter of ‘private trouble’ (Mills 1959/1980).
Historical changes that affect beliefs and attitudes about the future can be seen in view of the concept of opportunity structures. Roberts (2009) maintained that some aspects of opportunity structures have remained constant over the post-war period; chiefly those that affect the upper echelons of the British class system. They have always had access to the best schools and thus gained entrance into the elite professions in any society. For other social classes, in Britain as elsewhere, there have been more significant changes. While the labour market in the 1950s and 1960s provided more working-class job opportunities than now and young people could be ‘job hoppers’ at their wish, there were boundaries for job changes, ‘movements were mostly between similar kinds of jobs’ (Roberts 2009, p. 357) which is in contrast to ideals of upward social mobility.
Notions of choice were as important then as now, mainly because young people in the 1960s and 1970s felt in control of their lives since there was no shortage of job opportunities. Among sociologists at the time individualistic perspectives involving choices were criticised. To compensate for the over-emphasis on choice many did analyses of opportunity structures and focussed on aspects of young people’s surroundings such as ‘role models in families and neighbourhoods, and the expectations of teachers and peers at school’ (Roberts 2009, p. 357). Changes in the system of education in the UK, as in most of the countries either in or associated with the EU, have been similar over the past decades and involve more time in compulsory education, more emphasis on academic subjects and less on vocational options (Hobsbawm 1994; Nilsen 2020, 2023; Roberts 2009). According to Roberts (2009) in spite of significant changes at the structural level, social class is still a determining factor for what options and opportunities are available for young people. ‘Whenever social class differences are suppressed at one level in education, they consistently and immediately pop-up elsewhere’ (Roberts 2009, p. 360). In the labour market there have been changes in the occupational structures towards a majority of ‘good’ job opportunities in non-manual employment. The manual jobs that are available are low paid and often part-time jobs in the service sector (Vogt 2018). This broad brush picture of period specific conditions must be taken into consideration in studies about how the future is thought about and envisioned in contemporary sociology .
In 2013 a grant from the Norwegian Research Council gave the opportunity to do a study on intergenerational transmissions in the transition to adulthood.Footnote 19 Data consisted of biographical interviews with members in 23 three generation families from various social backgrounds in Norway, and nine in the UK. These data have been a rich source to draw from in a number of publications that have been presented elsewhere in this book. In studies where intergenerational relations were a theme the historical context was foregrounded. The temporal element was thus extended in that family time became an intermediate level between historical and biographical time (Hareven 2000).Footnote 20 Inspired by Hareven’s work on synchrony and intersecting temporalities and Mead’s notion of time, I published two articles in 2020Footnote 21 where this aspect of time was prominent.
In one of these (Nilsen 2020) the future was important in a comparative analysis of young English and Norwegian men’s thoughts about their lives in the future. The overarching question the article sought to address was ‘whether perceptions of the future are affected by how well timing at the biographical level, related to family time and resources, harmonise with historical time defined as features of opportunity structures in the particular national contexts’ (Nilsen 2020, p. 660). Two cases from each country were selected for analysis. A typology based on social class related to the educational levels of fathers and grandfathers in the families, the paper conceptualised those with privileged backgrounds as having an orientation to the future as confident continuity. The two young men from skilled worker backgrounds had an attitude towards their future lives that was characterised as cautious contingency. The typologies were valid across the national contexts in spite of the differences between the UK and Norway on a number of aspects since they were based on traits that over historical time had had similar development in both countries. The temporal theoretical starting point was in Mead’s concepts of the present as the location of both past and future.
For the two from privileged backgrounds,
there was a continuous trajectory between past, present and future at the levels of biographical and family time. Thus the future they envisaged in the present was not only contingent upon their personal decisions in the past and in the here and now; their attitude of confidence was related to future trajectories that have come to be regarded as a standard for a successful transition to adulthood in wider contemporary society. (Nilsen 2020, p. 674)
For those of less privileged backgrounds their present circumstances were not as they would have liked them to be. Neither had higher education and their living with parents was out of synch with family time and with their peers as most young people their age had moved out of the parental home. Theirs was an attitude that would keep the future at bay—‘the gap that had to be bridged in order to make their occupational ambitions achievable was too wide to consider in the present. The future they would like to have seemed in the present more like a dreamscape than a realistic destination’ (Nilsen 2020, p. 675). This typological divide must be considered in view of characteristics with structural features of the two societies in this particular historical period. Compared to conditions for older cohorts when in their early 20 s both the system of education and the labour marked have changed so much as to make it very difficult to find gainful employment when not having a degree. As one of the interviewees in this article said, ‘I feel there is too much emphasis on studies nowadays. You must have a bachelor or a master’s degree!’ (Nilsen 2020, p. 670).
In the mid-1990s project on young people’s thoughts about the future I interviewed a younger and an older cohort about their thoughts on future life. The interviews were done approximately 20 years before those of the Intergenerational study. I put the interviews from the two projects in ‘conversation’ with one another (Irwin and Nilsen 2018) to analyse differences in young women’s thoughts about the future. There were differences but also similarities between the two cohorts, one born in the mid-1970s and interviewed in the mid-1990s, the other born in the mid-1990s and interviewed in 2015. The in-depth contextualist analysis of the biographical interviews demonstrated some underlying patterns that could not be grasped immediately. Mead’s notion of time and the focus on the present and Hareven’s concept of ‘timing’ at the biographical level, together with Hareven’s focus on ‘timeliness’ at the societal level, was the temporal-conceptual starting point for my analysis. This framework was extended with the notion of ‘script’ in the life course literature and Ken Roberts concept ‘opportunity structure’ became an important conceptual inspirations in the grounded analysis.
What differences emerged could best be described with reference to the notion of temporal opportunity structures. I defined these as including both temporal and structural period specific elements that affect thoughts about the future, and ‘in addition to the notion of opportunity structures’ emphasis on social class, temporal opportunity structures add a gender sensitive element in that it takes timing and timeliness of life course phases and events into consideration’ (Nilsen 2023). This gendered aspect is important because women’s life courses are significantly different from men’s because of the limited period of fertility. For middle class women the boundaries of this period fall within the same phase as occupational careers are built, often in very competitive environments where men are in a majority in the highest positions. The focus on the ‘correct’ timing of life course events and transitions, and the ‘timeliness’ of these in relation to what is considered socially approved trajectories had more impact in the younger cohort. Whereas the context for the older ones could be characterised as ‘flexible opportunity structures and trajectory options’, the younger ones faced a ‘choice discourse and restricted norms of life course timing’. The very non-gendered standards of the temporality built into the opportunity structures made them more restrictive for women because of the short period of fertility in the life course. What also emerged in this analysis was the changing aspect of social class in the two cohorts. Women from upper middle-class backgrounds in the younger cohort expressed a more stressful situation in their thoughts about the future compared to what the older cohort from similar backgrounds did at the same age,
Social class is important for men and women alike (Brannen and Nilsen, 2005). The choice rhetoric that has become an institutionalised feature of social structures is easier to associate with middle-class life courses where both level and type of education give access to more arenas of opportunities than a standard working-class trajectory offers. Streamlined, genderless life course ideals are difficult for anyone to live up to but for women they become particularly constraining. (Nilsen 2023)
The aspects of social class that came across most clearly in these analyses are related to the changes in opportunity structures in Roberts’ (2009) sense: there are much fewer secure job opportunities available for young people without higher education, this is the case for both men and women. Since the female dominated jobs are mostly in the service sector, and these jobs have become increasingly insecure and underpaid, the temporal opportunity structures for young women with no higher education, are as stressful as those with degrees from university studies. The main differences are the lack of secure and steady employment for those with no academic degrees.
The most important difference between interviews with young men and women about their future lives, is that family and children sometime in the future come up unprompted in women’s thoughts about future life, regardless of social class. Young men more often have to be asked specifically about this issue as other topics seem to be more at the forefront of their thoughts about their future lives (Nilsen 2020). Although education and employment are equally important in the lives of men and women, family and children seem a more taken-for-granted part of life in the future for young women. This comes across in many studies on the topic: the timing of children and family is important in relation to future employment and occupational careers (Baker 2010; Cook 2018; Gill et al. 2016; Halrynjo and Lyng 2010; Hockey 2009). Genderless ideals about the timing and order of life course events, the temporal opportunity structure, have gendered effects across social classes.
Summary
The biographical life course approach is particularly suitable for capturing the connection between temporal levels, which is demonstrated in examples from studies about how young people think about the future. Biographical interviews offer opportunities to study these topics in very helpful ways when they are analysed with reference to the different levels of temporalties from the biographical to the historical.
The chapter has demonstrated how the impact of events during specific historical periods are of relevance for identifying topics about the future that are important from a sociological point of view. The focus on themes has varied according to historical circumstances. It has been argued for instance that the foregrounding of the individual to the expense of processes at the structural level, could be an effect of changes in historical and political circumstances from the latter part of the twentieth century. Where necessary for the understanding of particular periods studies based on other approaches than biographical ones have been drawn upon, particularly in research about the future where the focus is on social inequality.
Wider societal themes have been important in studies about the future, themes that go beyond questions relating to the personal biographical level. Young people’s thoughts about environmental issues have been discussed as examples of this. Such studies demonstrate
how a biographical life course approach may provide a wider understanding of how such topics are connected to and grounded in the context where life is lived. Environmental concerns have been an issue in the discipline of sociology over the past decades. As demonstrated above these matters were prominent in the 1990s’ studies of young people’s thoughts about the future of society. Such concerns have only increased as new environmental issues have become prominent. Threats of disasters from nuclear powerplants in the aftermath of Chernobyl in 1986, affected the theoretical approach in theories about ‘risk society’, as Beck’s successful books from the decade demonstrated. As the consequences of climate change have emerged and become evident, this topic has risen to prominence among the many environmental concerns that have become themes in sociological research in contemporary society.
The chapter took its starting point in the backcloth of ideas about Progress and how these replaced a belief in the future as created by deities with one where humans are in command of not only their individual future, but that of wider society. This shift did also involve a change in temporal outlook and thoughts about time in general. In empirical research the future as a topic has been on and off the agenda over the years. Studies discussed in this chapter have demonstrated how they are embedded in the historical periods they originated in. It has for instance been shown how the early studies of women and time, and gender specific thoughts about the future, were related to the then current changes in gender relations on the labour market, in politics and in the domestic sphere. The chapter has shown that whilst gender, age and social class are classic analytical elements of sociological studies that transcend historical periods, the topics their analytical distinctions are brought to bear on, vary considerably.
Notes
- 1.
This mechanistic notion of time as linear and development in terms of stages, are found in the writings of Darwin and Spencer in the nineteenth century (Kumar 1995).
- 2.
- 3.
The ‘low cost countries’ were low cost for many reasons. Among these were extremely low wages, little in the way of worker protection legislation so in many contexts factories were in reality sweatshops.
- 4.
Adam and Groves (2007) presented a novel philosophical framework for studies about the future where environmental concerns were prominent.
- 5.
An example of this is Adkins et al.’s (2023) article on recent changes in temporal features of capitalism where assets have taken over from commodities: ‘The asset economy actively structures, distributes and differentiates time, setting asset-owners on pathways to futures filled with the prospect of capital gains, further investments and intergenerational transfers of wealth, while leaving non-asset-holders to tread water in a precarious and seemingly never-ending now’ (Adkins et al. 2023, p. 360). This argument bear resemblance to those of Bauman (1998a, b) cited above.
- 6.
The term ‘risk’ can have many meanings. In Richard Sennet’s analyses he drew on theories of probability calculation, and the ‘regression to the mean’ in any set of random events, meaning that any previous event has no impact on future events; all events are isolated, one cannot predict the outcome of one event from any previous event (Sennett 1998).
- 7.
Beck (1992) related the concept of insurance with taking control over the future in the sense that it is about controlling the outcome of events that have not yet taken place. It involves calculating the probability (the risk) of certain events happening at some future point in time.
- 8.
The co-edited volume includes chapters from all the countries involved in the study. The main report was called Futures on Hold, countries included, Ireland, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
- 9.
- 10.
These are examples of publications that are based on a longitudinal study of young people in England in the late 1990s. Thomson and team developed different types of innovative biographical approaches in their analyses.
- 11.
At this point a digression into a gendered argument is in order. The focus was on men because of the gendered division of labour in society in general and the division of labour in the home during this height of the ‘housewife’ period (Oakley 1974/1990; Waerness 1978). The majority of women in Western societies did not have gainful employment during the historical period when the male-provider-model prevailed, although there were class differences as working class women were more likely to have low skilled jobs in order to add to the family income. As Joan Acker observed in the early 1970s, it did however take a long time for studies of social class to include women at all: ‘Very few sociologists have [even] recognised that they have, with the exception of the study of the family, constructed a sociology that tends to deal with only the male half of humanity’ (Acker 1973: 936). Rosemary Crompton (1989) was also critical of the way class analysis, and particularly studies of social mobility had not included women.
- 12.
- 13.
The concept of ‘gender’ had not entered into the mainstream research vocabulary in the social sciences at the time.
- 14.
Sverre Lysgaard was otherwise known as a progressive amongst the classics in Norwegian sociology. His writings on conditions for workers and their workplace relationships with co-workers and their collective relationship to management at different levels, applied a contextual case study approach that focused on the different structural systems in the workplace.
- 15.
This quote is from a different study and the Schneider and Lysgaard did not appear to subscribe to such notions.
- 16.
In studies of social mobility the survey and statistical analyses have been the most influential approaches and data. An important exception to this is Bertaux and Thompson’s (1997) study of social mobility based on biographical interviews. This study did not involve thoughts about the future as a specific topic, hence the presentation and discussion of this is in Chap. 4.
- 17.
There have been those in economist circles who have maintained that they predicted this crisis but there are disagreements about the issue.
- 18.
See Bottero (2019) for a pragmatist approach to the topic of social inequalities.
- 19.
The project had a comparative element with the UK and Professor Julia Brannen, my collaboration partner in a number of research projects and co-author on many articles, did interviews with nine UK families for the project.
- 20.
See Chap. 4 for details.
- 21.
They were both published online in 2019 and on paper in 2020.
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Nilsen, A. (2023). The Future as a Topic in Biographical Life Course Approaches. In: Biographical Life Course Research. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44717-4_5
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